Be afraid...
One of the advantages of working from home is that you get to choose what, if any, ambient noise you listen to and in this correspondent's case it's BBC Radio 4. In between the things like In Our Time, Women's Hour and Desert Island disks you get hourly news bulletins that you know represent the mainstream news agenda for the day, as they all cover the same stories.
If, as is often the case, the story is some political storm-in-a-teacup, Radio 4 may well determine the news agenda through its Today morning current affairs programme, which will usually interview some senior politician and give them a moderately hard time. That is what has happened today, with the latest chapter in the cyber attack saga.
Regular HEXUS readers will remember the warning from GCHQ - our signals intelligence operation - that the Internet has lowered the bar for entry into the espionage game. You didn't need to be too cynical to observe the coincidence between this statement and the imminent announcement of wide-ranging public sector cuts, and today's top news story makes it look even less coincidental.
The extent to which the government cuts the defence budget is coming under the most scrutiny of all, for the obvious reasons, and it looks like it's attempting to deflect criticism by emphasising that we're increasingly the target of threats that conventional armed forces can't fight - principally cyber terrorism.
So we had home secretary Theresa May talking to BBC Breakfast ahead of the publication of a new National Security Strategy, which theoretically influences the Strategic Defence Review, and in turn the Comprehensive Spending review, which are all going to be unveiled this week. May emphasised what a real and pressing threat cyber stuff is.
This was clearly just the start of a major PR drive to big-up the threat posed by cyber-nastiness. Another Home Office minister, Lady Neville-Jones, told the Guardian all about it, but the icing on the cake had to be Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, somehow finding a way to compare the threat to Pearl Harbour when talking to Today.
Now, with most things connected to the Internet these days, and that proportion set to grow further, there's no doubt that the prospect of an enemy being able to cripple our communications, infrastructure or even armed forces is one that needs addressing. But you have to wonder how much of this sudden emphasis exists mainly to distract attention from other defence cuts.
